Kū, Lono, and the Voices That Contend for Them: Interpreting Identity and Divinity in Hoʻomana Hawaiʻi

In January 1779, Hawaiians are reported to have received Captain James Cook as Lono, a god said to return each year from a distant homeland. Scholars have argued for decades over what actually happened there and what Hawaiians believed while it was happening. This article sets that historical question aside and asks a different one: what would it mean for a claim like "Cook is Lono" to be true at all? Taking the existing readings of Valerio Valeri, Marshall Sahlins, and Gananath Obeyesekere at face value, alongside Hawaiian scholars including Haunani-Kay Trask, Lilikalā Kameʻeleihiwa, and George Kanahele, the article follows out what each interpretation implies about divine identity, then tests these implications against each other. Before turning to Cook, the article uncovers the same puzzle already inside Hawaiian tradition, apart from any European visitor: the war god Kū appears in dozens of manifestations, and nothing in the existing scholarship explains what makes them one god rather than several sharing a name. Cook's case turns out to be this same puzzle with much higher stakes, no longer about a god's own forms but about whether a stranger could become one. The result unsettles a question usually treated as settled beforehand: whether Hawaiian religion counts as polytheistic, henotheistic, or something closer to an underlying monism. The article ends by asking whether that question was ever really prior, or whether the answer depends on working through cases like Cook's first.